How to Actually Use MSG
Plus, a recipe for Sichuan MSG Noodles (味精素面)
The above is a video to go along with the 2nd half of this post - i.e. the Sichuan MSG Noodle Recipe.
As a society, I think we’re finally starting to reach a more fact-based consensus around MSG.
You might’ve seen David Chang’s famed “MSG and Umami” presentation back in ‘13, or his follow up episode on MSG in Ugly Delicious. You might’ve seen Harold McGee (probably the best food writer alive today) talk about how MSG is harmless in his books or his articles. If you’re plugged into YouTube, as of late you might’ve seen My Name Is Andong’s or Adam Ragusea’s recent chats about the topic. And even barring all that, here on Reddit I’ve found that almost anyone that brings up that outdated anti-MSG sentiment is sure to get a bevy of replies talking explaining how it’s completely harmless.
So, you’re convinced. You accept the scientific consensus. So you go on Reddit, swing over to /r/cooking or our more illustrious older brother /r/askculinary… and sensibly ask this collection of pros and hobbyists how best to cook with your newfound crystalline umami powder.
And at this point, when I read some of the responses, I think it becomes enormously clear that we live in a food culture that has almost no first hand experience working with this ingredient (of course, we’ve got a lot of first hand experience with eating it in our junk food). It feels almost like the equivalent of asking a family of nomads from the Kazakh steppes their best advice on eating bluefin tuna. Some of the stuff I’ve heard:
MSG is magic. It will make everything more delicious.
I use a mix of 3 parts salt and 1 part MSG and just season everything with it.
MSG is basically super salt. Super salty but super good.
I add a bunch to my rice water before making rice. So good.
It’s a salt substitute. Use less salt, more MSG.
Nothing better than a steak seasoned with MSG after a good hard sear.
Etc etc. Going back and looking at some of those threads, there was definitely some good advice in there too, but you’d have to wade through some uh… less than informed answers.
Of course, quick note that I am far from an expert on, well, anything. And when it comes to taste? There’s not really any such thing as an objective truth anyhow. So if you happen to be that dude that adds MSG to their rice water, I might disagree but your opinion is just as valid as mine is (and I guess I haven’t cooked rice in MSG water, so hey, I prolly shouldn’t knock it until I try it lol).
It’s just that as we’ve done these recipes, as we’ve worked towards trying to nail down “that restaurant taste”… we’ve become pretty well versed in how we like to use MSG. I probably toss in at least a sprinkle in about a third of the dishes I cook. So I figured that it might be helpful to some give some general guidelines in how I tend to think about the ingredient in case you’re new to using it. And again, I’m no chef – don’t take my word as gospel. I’m just a dude on the internet after all. But if you’ve followed some of those recommendations online and been less than impressed (e.g. Adam Ragusea’s experience), maybe circle back and give these tips a whirl if you get the chance.
The way I’ll split this up is in two sections – first, some general tips on using the ingredient; and second, how to apply those by making a classic Sichuan dish from Leshan called, well, MSG Noodles.
How to Use MSG
First off, let’s set our expectations straight.
MSG is not magical yummy powder. It will not make crap cooking taste great – if it did, Applebees would’ve been adding it to anything and everything years ago. It’s in junk food, for sure, but there’s a lot that’s in junk food besides MSG that makes it addictive (lots of fats, sugars, and other flavor enhancers). You can’t sprinkle MSG on celery sticks and expect them to taste like a dry aged steak after.
Open your bag of MSG. Put a couple crystals on your finger. Taste it. That is the taste that’s going into your dish – you add your MSG right at the end, so it’s not going to change that much in the cooking process. If you’ve never tasted MSG before, don’t have a bag in front of you and want to follow along… I like to describe the taste of MSG as “fish sauce minus fish”.
So then, how to use it? I’m going to give you a short answer, followed by a long, rambly answer.
The short answer:
MSG can enhance and draw out the natural umami in other umami rich ingredients. Not sure what ingredients are umami-rich? Check out this list on wikipedia. I think most people by now are familiar with the umami that’s given by fish sauce, dried shiitake mushrooms, or even aged cheeses. The umami in, say, fresh mushrooms or tomatoes is often a bit less obvious. So if you add a bit of MSG to your roasted tomato sauce, or your mushroom stir-fry, it really highlights that aspect – at least according to my taste buds.
To balance spicy food. This is my personal favorite application of MSG. MSG works really, really well with spicy food - you already have a pretty overpowering flavor, and MSG rounds it out with a sort of 'richness', for lack of a better word. It's used quite a bit in Sichuan food for this reason, but I also love tossing some into my otherwise bog-standard extra-spicy Buffalo Wing sauce. I should also say that I think the inverse is also true: spiciness also balances MSG. If you find yourself in a jam after adding a bit too much MSG (more on that in a second), a bit of cayenne pepper helps bring things back to life.
MSG can be used in savory dishes to help ‘mellow out’ flavors, ala granulated sugar. This is a very difficult thing to describe, but MSG can help round out a dish. I’ll… explain more in my ‘long answer’ below.
As for how much to use? For use #1 and use #3, a really small sprinkle. Don’t overdo it – if you add too much, it’ll kinda give the dish that sort of one-note ‘processed food’ kind of taste. Let’s say no more than 1/8 tsp per each ~500g of food. It’s a strong flavor.
For use #2? You can potentially get away with a lot more. Because as I said, MSG balances heat but heat also balances MSG. For some Sichuan dishes, you can load things up with as much as a teaspoon per serving.
The long answer:
Let me start this ramble with a question and a pet peeve.
Pet peeve first. I kinda hate this meme that goes around that ‘why do we even bother with bay leaf? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually do anything’.
If that attitude describes you, try this: take a bay leaf, put it in a mug, and soak it for ten minutes in hot, boiled water. In a separate mug, add just water. After the time’s up, drink each cup of water. Can you tell the difference between the two?
If you’ve got functional taste buds, it shouldn’t even be a question. It’s absurdly obvious. While bay leaf’s a bit stronger of a smell than a taste, that smell is unmistakable.
Obviously, when it goes into stews and such, it slides into the background. It’s never mandatory – if I was making a stock and forgot the bay leaf, I’d never throw my hands up in the air and say “Fuck it! Can’t cook this without my bay!” But bay leaves are cheap (especially dried), so if you’ve got some around, why not?
Most dishes have layers of flavor, after all. Adding a touch of bay leaf can help give things some depth, make things less one note. It’s not the only way to skin that cat, but it’s one way.
Now for the question: why is black pepper used to season almost every Western dish?
Salt makes sense. It’s a flavor enhancer. We need it to survive.
But black pepper? Seems a little weird, right? How did we seem to arrive at this one singular spice – why aren’t there, say, clove shakers next to the salt shakers at the table? And I mean, it’s not like black pepper’s always a dominant flavor – not every dish is Steak au Poivre.
At the risk of completely butchering this explanation, I’m going to turn to Francois Chartier from the book Taste Buds and Molecules:
Recent studies have demonstrated that chilis [and black pepper] provoke in us more than a simple sensation of heat. Their sapid molecules create a temporary inflammation in our mouths, thus increasing the sensitivity of the taste buds and the mucous linings.
This increased sensitivity applies to temperature, touch, and the tactile or irritating aspects of some ingredients such as salt, acidic flavors, carbon dioxide, and cold.
This explains why once we are affected by the presence of capsaicin or peperine – the prickly molecule in pepper – our sense of taste becomes quite sensitive. This leads to the impression that the air we’re inhaling is cooler than it is, and the air we’re exhaling is a lot warmer.
So as is implied here, you don’t necessarily need to season with black pepper – capsaicin does the trick too. This is why you’ll see some people seasoning with a touch of hot sauce in certain parts of the US, or why Chef John likes to season with a sprinkle of cayenne pepper. Basically anything that contains any relative of capsaicin would do the trick – ginger can serve much the same function.
Now, anyone familiar with “seasoning” knows that it can consist more that just salt and pepper. I think a lot of people understand that a spritz of lemon or a swirl of vinegar can waken up a dish, and that a sprinkle of sugar in a savory dish can kind of help round things out. These terms – “waken up”/”round out” – are delightfully vague, so forgive me for not going through the motions of what their scientific basis is (if they have any at all). But it seems to be a workable framework nonetheless.
So to bring things together: when seasoning, it’s important I think to understand the laying of subtle flavors. When you add black pepper or MSG to a dish (or bay leaf, or garlic, or ginger etc etc), with very few exceptions the purpose isn’t make a dish taste overwhelmingly of pepper or MSG or garlic or bay leaf.
When I first started cooking, ‘seasoning’ to me meant adding salt until something tasted salty enough. Nowadays, I think of salt as just one dimension of seasoning. It’s one tool you’ve got in the toolbox. I think there’s really five components:
Salt. Of course.
Pepper -or- chilis -or- ginger. Helps waken things up.
Vinegar -or- dry wine -or- lemon. Acids also help to waken things up, albeit in a bit of a different direction.
Sugar. Helps round things out. Balanced by vinegar/lemon.
MSG -or- fish sauce. Or other umami rich ingredients soy sauce/anchovies too, arguably (I don’t find those ingredients as purely umami as MSG and fish sauce). Also helps round things out. Balanced by peppers/chilis/ginger.
So just like how with some dishes you might want to waken things up with a bit of lemon, at other times you might want a splash of pure vinegar. And while there’s a subset of cooks that seem to turn their nose up at MSG (“Hrumph I use real ingredients like fish sauce”), it, like vinegar, can often do a great job at delivering an isolated seasoning.
Of course, some ingredients give you a mix. Worcestershire sauce gives you acid/umami, a vinegary hot sauce gives spicy/acid, etc etc.
If you ever want to play around with seasoning, I think a bechemel-based cheese sauce for Mac N’ Cheese is the perfect canvas. You start with something rather plain, then add cheese. Then once that cheese’s melted… it’s your job to taste and adjust it until it’s perfect to your taste buds. Take your time with it. Add enough salt until it’s suitably salty. Add some cayenne and/or white vinegar and/or hotsauce until you no longer get that sort of overwhelming richness that you can sometimes get in a cheese sauce. Then add a sprinkle of sugar to balance those acids, and a sprinkle of MSG to round things out/add depth/highlight the umami of the cheese.
I don’t know if any of that actually made sense, but that’s just kind of how I like to think about things. I could be off my rocker a bit – again, not a chef or anything.
How to make Sichuan MSG Noodles
Ok, so this’s a pretty interesting dish from the town of Leshan (about 2-3 hours south of Chengdu). It’s one of the great food cities in Sichuan, and is the originator of a few classic Sichuan dishes (most notably perhaps, the ‘mala tang’ hot pot with small skewers).
This dish was invented in the mid 1950s, back when MSG was still a bit of a novelty in Sichuan. A local chef named Liu Zong Xiu added a healthy spoonful of MSG alongside her house chili oil to spruce up her vegetarian noodles… and it became sort of an instant classic.
Ingredients:
Alkaline noodles, preferably fresh; in an ideal world, fresh Sichuan-style gungunmian (棍棍面), 150g per serving. This dish uses a fresh alkaline noodle called “gungunmian” which’s slightly on the thick side. I’ll give you a super brief rundown on how to make it if you’re into trying a noodle project (we also show you how to make it in the video), but you could use some proper Japanese ramen noodles for this too. Fresh are preferably, but if you’ve got dried they can also work in a pinch.
MSG (味精), ¾ tsp per serving. So for the most part MSG is MSG, but you’ll find two types different ‘grain sizes’ of MSG – the one that look like larger crystals (almost as large as like small sprinkles), and the smaller sort that’re a bit more of a ‘jagged powder’. With this kind of recipe where the MSG isn’t dissolved, it’s best if you use the latter. The former can totally be used too, just do a bang up job mixing them into the sauce (or give them a quick crush beforehand).
Sichuan-style Red Chili Oil (红油), 1 tbsp per serving. So I shared a recipe for Sichuan style chili oil here a while back, and the always excellent ChinaSichuanFood’s got a recipe here if you’d like another resource to compare/contrast. Don’t feel like undertaking a chili oil project? Hey, times are rough, understandable. Try swapping that with some Lao Gan Ma chili crisp, spooning a bit more oil than crisp. It definitely won’t be the same thing (so don’t tell anyone from Leshan we said it was ok) but it’d be tasty too. If going that route, cut your MSG quantity in half, as Lao Gan Ma’s already packed to the brim with it.
Suimi Yacai, Sichuanese pickled and fermented mustard green (碎米芽菜), 1 tbsp per serving. So in Leshan they actually have a special sort of Yacai, which’s a bit sweeter and uses only the stems. It’s nice, but we tested this with the more common abroad Yibin Suimi Yacai too (it’s available on Amazon, I swear), and it totally works. Can’t find yacai? While you might be starting to flirt with ‘no-longer-a-Leshan-MSG-noodle’, you could play around with other sorts of Chinese pickles, like zhacai or Tianjin preserved vegetable. Can’t find any of those? Screw it, charge right on ahead without, it won’t be the same but you can still make a tasty noodle.
Sugar, ½ tsp per serving.
Light soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp per serving.
Sliced scallions, 1 tbsp per serving.
… and that’s it! Basically a list of the most common “Sichuan noodle” usual suspects. Differs from stuff like Dan Dan Noodles or Yibin Burning Noodles primarily in just how hard it leans into that chili oil/MSG combination.
Process:
I’ll be totally honest, I’m running out of breath a bit after that “how to use MSG” essay. So I’m going to just cheat and give you a super high level overview of how to make Sichuan-style gungunmian.
First, know that the dough itself is basically exactly the same as the noodles for Yibin Burning Noodles – there’s a slight difference in shape but that’s pretty much it.
Mix ½ tsp of sodium carbonate -or- Jianshui/Kan Sui into 90g of water, then knead that together with 210g of break or noodle flour (preferably, but AP does the job ok too). Knead or use the stand mixer with the hook for 8 minutes, then rest it for a half an hour. Flatten it out, pass it through a pasta maker ~6 times, folding the dough over itself in either halfs or thirds each time. Then pass it through again at the second widest setting, then on the 3rd widest setting, and finally cut it by cranking it through the narrow slice on your pasta maker (~2mm wide).
In a bowl, mix together the MSG, the chili oil, the yacai, the sugar, the soy sauce, and the scallions. Really try to make sure the MSG is dissolved into the chili oil/soy sauce.
Boil your noodles for ~1 minute until just past al dente, quick strain, then immediately toss in the bowl together with your seasoning. ~1 minute is for the Sichuan-style gungunmian. Especially if using dried noodles, simply follow the instructions on your noodle package.
The straining should be super quick here (like, a couple shakes is fine) – don’t let these sit out for long. As soon as they leave the pot, your shot clock’s ticking. If you find them sticking a bit too much, and tough to mix, you can add a touch of water to help loosen things up a bit.
Now, I know a “two step recipe” isn’t usually quite our style, so you can also eat this together with a classic Chinese pork-bone-and-kelp soup if you like. Drink the soup alongside the noodle, but you can at the same time toss some kelp strips and eat it all together.
Another option is a bit of sliced cabbage – you can toss that in and cook it alongside your noodles (if using fresh noodles), or toss it in near the end if opting for dry.